The Naked City Blog

Exploring life in the city – Charlotte – and the greater metro region. Looking at urban design, transportation, growth, the built environment and more.

Mary Newsom is a lifelong journalist and observer of city life in the Charlotte region and beyond, with a focus on urban design, sustainable development, growth and city planning. She is associate director of urban and regional affairs at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. Her blog reflects her views only, not necessarily those of the institute or of UNC Charlotte.
Contact: mnewsom@uncc.edu.

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Tuesday, June 21, 2011

A Ponzi scheme in suburbia?

First blog of the New Era.

First up - Is suburban development a Ponzi scheme? In "The growth Ponzi scheme, part 1" from New Urban Network, writer Charles Mahron makes this claim: The typical American pattern of development doesn't support itself. He writes: "The great experiment of suburbanization that America embarked on following World War II has no precedent in human history. As it enters its third generation, the flawed assumptions that were overlooked are now coming back to bite us in a cruel way."

I think Mahron is onto something, and I know he's not alone in questioning whether the country and its governments – federal, state and local – can afford to support the immense and spread-out infrastructure we've created in the pat 50 years. I know that Charlotte's Department of Transportation and its Fire Department looked at the cost-savings to be had in fire and emergency services when streets are in a connected network versus cul-de-sac-collector-type patterns.

But has anyone seen any academically rigorous studies that look seriously at this question? It's easy to hypothesize. Which is why we all do it.

Is LEED truly leading? This article in Miller-McCune, "Is LEED the Gold Standard in Green?" tells of a lawsuit against the well-known Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system by a New York engineer named Henry Gifford. He contends the energy savings for LEED-certified buildings can be drastically overrated.
Why is this important? As the article notes, the building sector consumes 49 percent of all energy produced in the United States, and 77 percent of all the electricity produced in the nation is used to operate buildings." Building more energy-efficient buildings is a huge need. And if the only real rating system available doesn't, after all, save as much energy as it claims, well, that's a problem.

LEED, for its part, has been addressing some of the criticisms since before the lawsuit. It has begun requiring certified buildings to track predicted energy savings versus actual savings, and it's re-inventing its rating program.

Despite the Great Recession as a potential reset in policies, the Charlotte Region is set to see more highway spending than ever in its history. Just add up completing 485, widening 485, widening Independence, widening 85, widening 77, the Monroe ByPass, the Gastonia Bypass.

Based on all this sprawling-as-usual, I suppose Charlotte's strategy in the latest cycle of the Ponzi scheme is to steal the most talented oil-addicts from other metropolitan regions. After stagflation surfaced, "growth" really only become a shifting of resources and jobs. In the latter 20th century, this shift was mostly from cities to suburbs. In the early 21st century, this is changing to a "robbing" of poorer metros (the Great Lakes Foundry) by richer metros (NC Piedmont and Texas Triangle). So let's keep sprawling!